Santa returns as Mad Monk wins control of the nuthouse

Mike Carlton

At the climax of that classic movie One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, a sad, stuttering boy in the psychiatric hospital cuts his own throat. In reprisal, Randle McMurphy, the Jack Nicholson character, attempts to strangle the loathsome Nurse Ratched. He is given a lobotomy and is eventually smothered with a pillow. The inmates seize control of the asylum.

Segue to the federal parliamentary Liberal Party, which we find in a similar state of chaos. Readers might enjoy reworking the movie with the current crop of thespians. I like the idea of Ratched played by Senator Nick Minchin, he of the coffin-plate smile and eyes as cold as hypodermic needles. Malcolm Turnbull is McMurphy, his political career snuffed out. Joe Hockey stars as Chief Bromden, the hulking nice guy who flees the mayhem by heaving an electrical switchboard through a barred window.

Enter the Mad Monk, shambling into frame like a gorilla at a wedding. He has form in the ward, as the hitman for a former patient, Howard The Toad, who mysteriously vanished from the institution some years ago, leaving the inhabitants he had dominated lost in limbo.

In mounting panic, the inmates elect The Monk as their leader by one wafer-thin vote. At first there is euphoria but, as night falls, they realise, too late, that once again they have chosen the agent of their destruction.

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Naturally, the rise of Abbott to greatness brought squeals of delight from the media pundits of the uber-right. Unsurprisingly, they have glossed over a small but crucial point. The Mad Monk is not a Liberal at all. He is a throw-back to the nasty old Democratic Labor Party of half a century ago.

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Abbott once famously quipped that he is the ideological love child of John Howard and Bronwyn Bishop. He might have gone on to acknowledge that his godfather in that bizarre union was Bartholomew Augustine Santamaria, the late and unlamented Catholic activist and progenitor of the DLP in all its sectarian fear and right-wing loathing.

The evidence is in an obituary he wrote for Santamaria in 1998, boasting that "the DLP is alive and well and living inside the Howard government". Bad mistake, that. One of Tony's troubles is that he can barely go a month without dropping some clanger that demands a grovelling retraction.

Australians, happily, do not fret about the religious beliefs (or not) of their leaders. Plenty of Catholics have scaled the political heights on talent alone, and a good thing too. But the voters also believe in the separation of church and state, a concept The Monk seems unable to grasp.

Like Santamaria, he has about him the whiff of the ultramontane. There is a well-founded public perception that he is the all-too-eager instrument of the political ambitions of his cardinal confessor, George Pell, as Santamaria was to the machinations of the scheming Archbishop Daniel Mannix.

The much-vaunted broad church of the Liberal Party is no more. It has been demolished by the far-right Minchinites who, with Abbott as their bovver boy, have mugged its moderate stream like back-alley thugs. An iron clad rule of Australian politics is that winners get there by capturing the middle ground. Howard managed it, however deviously. The Mad Monk cannot. Choosing him as their leader, the Liberals have quixotically flung that happy position to the winds. Their next prime minister might not yet be in the Parliament.

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From the Liberal cuckoo's nest to Labor's ship of fools. Last Thursday, the day of Nathan Rees's execution, I bumped into an old friend who had been a senior minister in the Wran government. An elder of the Labor Right, he was almost speechless at the folly unfolding. "I cannot believe the Right would be that stupid," he groaned.

The rest of us can. That stupid and more. The coup against Rees by those two backroom buffoons Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi has placed this fly-blown Government beyond derision and beneath contempt.

When he became Premier, Rees told me over lunch that he was determined to cleanse NSW politics of the cancer of political donations from property developers on the make. Whatever his failings, he did have a red-hot go at it.

He leaves with his honour enhanced.

By guile and treachery, Obeid and Tripodi have returned the NSW ALP to the touts and lurk merchants.

The usurper, Kristina Keneally, is an airhead who once tried to ban T-shirts that might offend the Pope on his Sydney visit. As planning minister she was blithely unaware of the cozy meetings between her departmental head and the developers' friend, Good Ol' Richo. As Rees correctly said, she will be the puppet of this malignant duo. What a TV ad that will make for the Libs.

Labor was set to lose the next election. It will now be a bloodbath, richly deserved.

NILE'S NAVY BLUE SOLUTION

PITY the voters of Bradfield, the blue-ribbon Liberal seat vacated by Brendan Nelson. Called forth from their swimming pools and tennis courts, Hamish's soccer game and Jessica's jazz ballet classes, they will find at the polling booths for today's by-election a record 22 candidates.

The ballot paper will be the size of a small tablecloth. The law requires that each of the 22 squares must be numbered, or the vote will be informal. This silliness is largely the work of that inveterate pest, the Reverend Fred Nile, whose Christian Democratic Party is fielding nine candidates. For what reason I cannot imagine.

Apart from his usual claptrap about the Muslim menace, Nile's most loopy policy plank is that the Fijian Navy should be employed to intercept "illegal immigrants" heading for Australia. It might help voters to know that the Fijian Navy can muster, on a good day, some 300 matelots in a handful of clapped-out patrol boats.

Its chief, Commander Francis Kean, is a brother-in-law of the country's dictator, Commodore Frank Bainimarama. Kean was only recently released from jail for manslaughter after he punched the daylights out of a guest at a family wedding. I do hope Nile's Christian soldiers have taken these small difficulties into account.